Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Buhari Wasted Opportunity to Reform Nigeria - Chimamanda

Author,
Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie told the New York Times that president Muhammadu
Buhari has squandered the massive goodwill and support he had upon his
inauguration as president and missed an opportunity to set Nigeria on the right
path.

“Mr. Buhari
ascended to the presidency with a rare advantage not only did he have good will
of a majority of Nigerians, he elicited a peculiar mix of fear and respect,”
she wrote in an opinion for the New York Times, published on Tuesday.

For the First
weeks of his presidency, it was said that civil servants who were often absent
from work suddenly appeared every day, on time, and that police officers and
custom officials stopped demanding bribes.

She said
although she experienced political fear for the first time, aged seven, under
Buhari's military regime in 1984, she welcomed his election 30 years later in
2015, because, “he represented some form of hope.”

“Because for
the first time, Nigeria voted out an incumbent in an election that was largely
free and fair,” she said.

“Because Mr.
Buhari had sold himself as a near – ascetic reformer, as a man so personally
above board that he would wipe out Nigeria’s decades – long corruption.”

Although she
acknowledged that Nigeria was difficult to govern, she said Buhari wasted an
opportunity through his actions from his appointments to his economic
decisions.

“He had an
opportunity to make real reforms early on, to boldly reshape Nigeria’s path. He
wasted it,” she said.

“Perhaps the
first clue was the unusually long time it took him to appoint ministers. After an
ostensible search for the very best, he presented many recycled figures with
whom Nigerians were disenchanted.

“But the
real test of his presidency came with the continued fall in oil prices, which had
begun the year before his inauguration.”

She explained
that while the plunge in oil prices was bound to have a catastrophic impact on
the economy because it was “Unwholesomely dependent on oil”, Buhari’s actions
made it even more so.

She cited
the policy of defending the naira through which the official exchange rate was
kept “artificially low”, but caused the exchange rate to balloon on the black
market and restriction of access to the central bank’s foreign reserves, which “spawned
corruption.”

She said
while the exchange rate crisis caused the price for everything – rice, bread,
cooking oil – to rise and forced businesses to fire employees with some
folding, “the exclusive few who were able to buy dollars at official rates
could sell them on the black market and earn large profits – transactions that
contribute nothing to the economy.”

Chimamanda
said although Buhari believed, rightly, that Nigeria needed to produce more of
what it consumed, and he wanted to spur local production, local production
could not be willed into existence if the supporting infrastructure was absent.

She said: “And
banning goods has historically not led to local production, but to a thriving
shadow market,” she added.

“His
intentions, good as they well might be, are rooted in an outdated economic
model and an infantile view of Nigerians.

“For him, it
seems, patriotism is not a voluntary and flexible thing, with room for dissent,
but a marital enterprise; to obey without questioning.”

She also
faulted Buhari’s handling of the herdsmen/farmers clashes in the country.

“Since Buhari
came to power, villages in the middle – belt and southern regions have been
raided, the inhabitants killed, their farmlands sacked. Those attacked believe
the Fulani herdsmen want to forcibly take over their lands for cattle grazing.

It would be
unfair to blame Mr. Buhari for these killings, which are, in part, a reslt of
complex interactions between climate change and land use. But, leadership is as
much about perception as it is about action, and Mr. Buhari has appeared
disengaged.

“It took him
months, and much criticism from civil society, to finally issue a statement “condemning”
the killings. His aloofness feels, at worst, like a tacit enabling of murder
and, at best, an absence of sensitive leadership.

“Most important,
his behavior suggests he is tone – deaf to the widely held belief among
southern Nigerians that he promotes a northern Sunni Muslim agenda.

“He was no
less opaque when the army murdered hundreds of members of a Shiite Muslim in
December, burying them in hastily dug graves. Or when soldiers killed members
of the small secessionist pro – Biafran movement who were protesting the arrest
of their leader, Nnamdi Kanu, a little – known figure whose continued
incarceration has elevated him to a minor martyr.”

In terms of
the war on corruption, she said: “Nigerians who expected a fair and sweeping
cleanup of corruption have been disappointed. Arrests have tended to be
selective, targeting mostly those opposed to Mr. Buhari’s government.

“The anti –
corruption agencies are perceived not only as partisans, but as brazenly
flouting the rule of law.”